


i resign myself to ruin (into the blue)

by almadeamla



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Bondage, Character Death, Comeplay, Creampie, Crossdressing, Dildos, F/M, Graphic Description of Corpses, Graphic Descriptions of Childbirth, Hand Jobs, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oral Sex, Rimming, Rough Sex, Tit Torture, lmao i fucking hate all these tags
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2020-06-29 10:30:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19828297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almadeamla/pseuds/almadeamla
Summary: AU of 2.01. Shane gets left behind after the CDC.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My attempt at an angsty, plotty Rick/Shane love affair. Sorry for chapters 2 and 3. There will be a lot of sex. And dildos. Please blame Book_Wyrm for not telling me to delete this.

There was no quiet this deep into summer. Outside the crickets rubbed their legs together in a rising chorus, a mocking repose of the dead and the living. The heat of the day faded with the fall of evening, but the mugginess lingered. Rick felt a sheen of moisture over his body, worse on the quads of his thighs, where a mess the lube and come mixed together, the space between Shane’s legs filthy wet. A thin spectral of moonlight filtered in through the fabric of the tent. Rick could barely see Shane beneath him, the dark of his hair, his head bowed into the blanket, the junction where his broad shoulders met his neck. He was beautiful, a carnal thing in the darkness, too perfect to be real--some manifestation of Rick’s most perfect desire.

It was easy to lose time here. No more digital clocks or cellphones, no daylight for hours, Carl and Judith fast asleep. Rick had nothing to be responsible for now but chasing his own pleasure, slow, because they had to be quiet. Shane’s hand on his anchored Rick, spurred him on. Shane guided their hips back together and the hot clutch of his body warmed Rick like the sun. Rick wanted to stay there forever, no feeling but Shane around him, no death, no walkers, just Shane’s low breathing and the taste of his sweat.

Rick was close. He felt it building, and he gripped Shane tighter, found the curve of his hipbone and pressed his thumb into it, a counterpoint to the rush of being swept over the edge. Shane would anchor him through his orgasm. He’d kept Rick steady through so much. There were days he felt light-headed, too stretched thin for gravity to pull on. Shane kept him from losing himself and floating away.

Outside there was the sound of sheet ripping. A wail. Thrashing. Carl shouting, “Shane! Dad,” and sounding panicked, raw, awful terror, the kind Rick had never heard.

Shane was up. He charged through the tent flap and tore the nylon, tumbling naked out into the night. Rick followed close behind him. There was scrambling throughout the camp, the sounds of zippers, lanterns and flashlights cutting through the darkness. The distance between their tent and the kid’s, only a few footsteps, felt like miles.

Shane got there first. He disappeared inside before Rick could even see the hole he’d gone through. It was at ground level, along the seam, frayed. Something had picked at the fabric, scratching over and over until it split. Shane fired his gun, once, twice, and Rick wanted to say not inside the tent, not so close, it would hurt Judith’s ears. The smoke would get in Carl’s eyes. He made his way in, Python drawn, not that he’d need it. Shane never missed.

Rick couldn’t breathe. The smell of gunsmoke and iron made his eyes water. Through the blood and brain spatter, putrid smears of flesh, he saw Judith tangled in her blankets. She was missing half her head. One of her arms was bone down to the socket. Her intestines spilled from her mangled belly across the floor.

He dropped to his knees. Shane was shouting, “are you hurt, Carl, are you bleeding,” and Rick pressed two fingers to the side of Judith’s neck. No pulse. Her skin was already cooling.

Judith’s mouth was slack, brown eyes dull and pointed skyward. Rick covered her with a corner of the sleeping bag. It had been too hot for that, nevermind the risk of SIDS associated with blankets. She was beyond those concerns now, beyond the pain her last moments had caused her. Carl didn’t need to see his sister torn apart that way. Rick didn’t want that to be how he remembered his sister, huge chunks of her skill gone, her brain dug out by rotten fingers, her sweet face frozen in agony and horror.

“Carl!” He watched Shane use his hands to staunch the flow of blood from a wound on Carl’s thigh. A ricochet from Shane’s bullet. Or maybe a puncture from Carl’s knife lying on the ground. In the dark, the noise of his sister being devoured, Carl had likely started swinging and injured himself.

“You woozy?” Shane asked, down at Carl’s level. “How much blood have you lost? You know if you tore the femoral artery?”

Rick grabbed one of Judith’s spare diapers in the corner. It’d do better than Shane’s hand, at least until Hershel could get at it with a real bandage. Some frenzied part of his brain supplied that they were _extra-absorbent_.

“Here,” he said. “Shane, let me take a look at it. I’ll wrap it.”

Shane did. When he lifted his hands, there was not the spurt of blood Rick was expecting, the gush of a mortal wound. Time stopped. The world ceased its spinning. It was death, the end of days, that dark and terrible moment of the rapture when all souls left standing knew they would not be saved.

He saw, illuminated in the moonlight, a perfect set of teeth marks. Rick heard buzzing, the bellow of a thousand cicadas, the singularity of his heartbeat echoing in his ears. This couldn’t be happening.

“Dad?” Carl said, tears in his eyes, ragged, staring down at his leg in disbelief, in mourning, and he was so young, reaching up for his father. Rick went to him to offer what comfort he could.

Shane shouted, a primal sound, the cry of an animal, full of grief. Rick couldn’t look at Shane. He didn’t want to see his sorrow mirrored in Shane’s expression. It didn’t seem possible, the night had started so promising. Uneventful. There’d been no warning, and wasn’t that life’s worst kind of cruelty--it never gave any precursor to something bad as this.

There were footsteps, the thud of the cavalry arriving, charging in only to find the battle already over, the walker dead, permanently, splayed at an angle, blown apart by Shane’s gun. Shane was tending now to Judith, he’d been running on instinct when he first arrived on the scene and remembered his disaster training. Judith was a black tag, no sense wasting time and other resources on her when she was already dead. But now, Carl tended to, Shane could spare her some of his attention. Some of his sadness. One last moment of tenderness in death.

Their friends stood at the tent’s entrance, frozen. Rick knew how it had to look. Shane naked, lube streaked on his thighs, blood down to his elbows, rocking what was left of Judith. Rick in just his boxers, Carl crying into his chest.

“Rick,” Hershel said softly, “I can take a look at him.”

“Go,” he heard himself saying, he stroked Carl’s soft hair. “Please, just leave us alone.”

The footsteps retreated, but someone left behind a lantern, its flame dim and already dying, that tiny yellow pinprick of light winking in and out of existence, threatening to disappear.

***

Rick didn’t notice anything was wrong until Daryl rode up to the driver’s side window. He and Lori were too busy calming a near-hyperventilating Sophia and Carl, both of them shaking themselves to pieces in their mother’s laps. For all that they had become familiar with death in the weeks since the plague had started, this was the closest they’d come since. Even the attack on the quarry, as horrible as it had been, hadn’t seemed as hopeless. Worse, it had been at the hands of a human--a doctor--someone they’d implicitly been taught to trust. It was enough to challenge what little faith they had left in the world.

Daryl rode in close, the roar of his bike’s engine loud enough to cut through their conversation. Lori was telling Carl that some people were too sad to keep on living in the end. They made their decision. It was the living’s job to respect it and carry through. To find happiness on earth for those in heaven.

Daryl gestured for Rick to slow down and he did, easing into it, not so abrupt as to worry the children.

Rick opened the door, hoping to let in a gust of cool air. They weren’t using the air conditioning in order to get better gas mileage and stretch their fuel. They had the windows cracked but it hadn’t helped much with the humidity. They were starting to stick to the truck’s vinyl seats. “Everything alright?”

“Can’t see Shane. Can’t remember last time I did.”

Rick looked out over their caravan. Dale poked his head out the RV’s front window in confusion. T-Dog sat in his van, hands on the wheel, waiting to move. Shane’s Jeep was missing and Rick’s heart sped up, anticipating that, any second, it would appear. He must have had to stop, needed to take a piss, on road trips he’d always had a girl bladder, even Lori had made fun of him each time they pulled over so he could pee. That was it, Rick was sure of it.

He looked back the way they’d come. The city was a speck on the horizon trailing a thin plume of smoke. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen Shane’s Jeep in the rearview mirror with any real clarity. Not since they first raced away from the CDC. He’d had more pressing concerns. Carl. Lori. Leading everybody somewhere safe.

They should have ridden together. They had enough vehicles already, didn’t need Shane’s unless they planned on going off-roading, and they couldn’t, anyway, not with the RV. Shane could have squeezed in the back of the pickup with Carol and Sophia, it wouldn’t have been too much. Dale might have appreciated the company. Every possibility swirled around Rick with distressing clarity.

T-Dog climbed out now, fanning his face with the collar of his shirt. “What do you want to do? Should we send someone back to look for him? I got some gas to spare, I can drive for an hour, see if I run into him.”

Shane had said splitting up was suicide, thinning of their resources. After the massacre at the quarry, Rick was inclined to keep the able bodied men here. “Let’s wait awhile, maybe he fell behind.”

By midday they were baking beneath the sun. Carl was red from his neck to his ears, hair damp and wild, burnt from standing on top of the RV with Dale’s binoculars. There was no sign of Shane.

Dale came to Rick, wringing his hat in his hands. “Son, we need to get going soon. We’re going to get heatstroke sitting out here like this without water.”

“It’s been three hours,” Lori added, looking ansty. They all were. They kept spooking themselves, worrying the walkers from the city had followed them here. That any second they’d come groaning over a bend in the road, arms outstretched.

“A little longer,” Rick said. “He might’ve had to change a tire.” He’d always helped Shane with those, he couldn’t remember if Shane had ever changed one without him. It had been years since Rick had changed one alone. Once, when he and Lori had taken Carl out for a day trip to Atlanta, they’d blown a tire going over a broken bottle. Shane had driven an hour from home just to bring them a spare.

“Rick,” Lori said, sternly, and put her hand in his.

“Yeah, okay.” He turned toward the other end of the highway. The grass was green in the pastures, patches of yellow flowers swayed in a timid breeze. The blue glass sky went on for miles.

Was Shane watching the same sky? Did he smell the sweet wind from the mountains, or was he ambling onward mindless, teeth snapping, unable to feel anything but hunger ever again? There were too many options, none seemed fitting. He should have gone out in a blaze of glory, a death befitting an action hero, not whatever had happened, ripped apart and eaten by ghouls. And he hoped that was what had happened, either shot himself clean or wholly eaten, not undead forever, rotten to his bones. He hoped it had been quick.

“Back in the vehicles,” Rick said. His voice cracked, not with emotion, but from the dryness in his throat.

Carl ran up, binoculars dangling around his neck. His face pinched, eyes huge. “Dad, no. We can’t go yet. Shane’s still coming.”

“He’s gone Carl.” Carl looked increasingly upset. He looked like he might make a run for it. He’d done that when he was small and he didn’t get his way. He’d wait for his moment, a single break in Lori or Rick’s attention, before he made his escape. Rick didn’t have the energy to chase him. “We need to keep going. He’d want us to.”

Carl climbed in beside Lori, no longer sitting in between them. Angry, pouting, crying silently, big tears streaking down his cheeks. Sophia leaned over the seat and put her hand on his shoulder. Carl let her.

Rick turned the keys in the ignition. He took one last look in the rearview mirror at the city skyline--nothing, even the smoke was clearing.

He drove.

***

For a while it seemed they’d make it. The weather was in their favor. They hadn’t seen a walker since the city. The sad irony left them all somber. They’d sought refuge in the city, in technology and promises, and yet it was out here, under the open sky that they would have been safest.

They were hurting for water but it was nothing careful rationing couldn’t manage. They were out of the heat, no longer just waiting, they could make it. It had been the right call, Rick knew. They’d given Shane what they could, but surviving was moving forward.

Then they came to a tangle of traffic in the road. Too thick for anything bigger than Daryl’s motorcycle to traverse through. Vehicles were so tightly jammed together it was a miracle they’d been able to move at all when they were first fleeing, he imagined it must have been like rush hour outside Atlanta, traffic slowed down to a crawl, everyone inching anxiously forward until the end—until they’d opened their doors and hightailed it for the hills.

“Now what do we do?” Dale gaped like a fish as he peered out across the stretch of highway. “We’d need a tow truck to clear a path wide enough for the RV.”

“Start with gas. Let’s see what we can siphon—we can decide on what route to take once we have fuel.” He gestured at Daryl, T-Dog, Glenn, and himself. “The four of us will get the gas. The rest of you see what supplies you can scavenge. Pair up--no one should go alone.”

Such simple advice. Stay together. And still, Shane had been the one on his own. No company in the Jeep beside him, no one to watch his back. Rick hadn’t even given him a passing thought. Shane had always seemed invincible, made of something stronger.

Kneeling beside a pickup with a blown tire, T-Dog sealed his mouth around the frayed end of the garden hose and sucked, cheeks hollowing, and finally spat a trickle of gasoline onto the pavement, coughing. Rick kept an eye out for danger. He would do better this time around.

T-Dog shuddered, wiping his lips on the shoulder of his shirt, “that’s nasty, ugh, you get the next one.”

Rick had watched Shane do the same back when they were fresh out of the academy. Shane had siphoned a few gallons from the patrol car to impress a stranded car of sorority girls. He’d gone out with each of them, one after the other. At the time Rick had thought it was pretty cool.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Dale peering through his binoculars, brows furrowed. Rick followed Dale’s line of sight with the scope of his rifle. A walker ambled into view, slowly making its way out from behind a tangle of cars. Rick readied himself, a head shot from this distance would be hard to miss. Just as he was about to pull the trigger, another walker joined the first, then another, and another, too many to keep track of. Too many to take down.

T-Dog heard the moans. He and Rick shared a look of panic. “Under the cars!”

Rick headed back to Lori, to Carl. “Under the cars!” he said again, louder, motioning for them to drop the clothes and other things they’d gathered and find cover.

The children made it under as the first walker rounded the corner. Rick’s blood felt too much for his body, his heartbeat loud enough for everyone to hear. They were so exposed. It would only take one walker to stumble, to catch their scent, and it would be over. They’d meet their end here, in this little stretch of abandoned highway, and they would be just another group of souls lost to the road. He could see Sophia and Carl from where he was, Carl shaking as he fought to stay quiet, stay still. Rick wanted to offer him comfort. He had played hide and seek like this as a boy. Hiding beneath his parent’s bed, surrounded by dust bunnies, stifling giggles as he watched Shane’s feet through the gap where the duvet didn’t quite touch the floor. It hadn’t been as terrifying then.

It happened in a second. Sophia shrieked and the groans took on a more sinister note, the snarl of an animal on the hunt, the satisfied noise of an almost-meal.

There was no time.

Rick lay on his belly beneath an old Corolla and he could see Carol, frantic, Lori holding her down.

Sophia screamed again. He watched it happen, slow like in a movie, Sophia scrambled out from her hiding place, walker close behind. She threw her body over the guardrail, another walker joining the first, drawn in by the moans it made as it gave chase, and shock pinged through Rick’s body as Sophia dropped out of sight and disappeared.

He followed.

They’d lost so much already, more good people than they ought to. _Shane_. He wasn’t going to lose another.

Sophia wailed when he caught up to her and grabbed her. She dug her nails, hard, into the skin of his face and neck, thrashing as she beat him with her small hands. “It’s me, it’s me,” he said, and he felt the fight flow out of her body. She wrapped her arms and legs around him in relief. He hefted her up like she were his own daughter and ran.

Moving. They had to keep moving.

They didn’t get far. His arms ached and his lungs burned. Every new step sent his heart pounding. He drew huge, heavy breaths. It was too much. The stress and heat and his own weakness had accumulated, augmented, and he was in too poor of shape—would he ever be strong enough to keep anyone safe?

They could hear the walkers behind them moaning and stumbling through the brush. They smacked loudly into the stumps of dead trees. Leaves crunched like bones beneath their feet.

He set Sophia down. He felt her shaking, he could see her tears running down her dirty face in tracks. “I have to stop. I can’t,” he said, panting. They limped along together, Sophia tugging him, Rick trying and failing to catch his breath.

“Come on Mr. Grimes,” Sophia wept, hysterical. “Please don’t let them get me. I don’t want to die.”

Rick tried what he’d seen Shane do sometimes after running too many sprints at football practice. He held his arms high above his head. “We need to hide—or get somewhere they can’t find us. They don’t get tired, I do. They’ll run us down eventually.”

He looked around. There was nowhere to go that the walkers couldn’t sniff them out. This wasn’t a game of hide and seek at a backyard cookout, they couldn’t hope for the best and crouch behind some bushes.

In a dappled spotlight of sunshine he saw a Sugar Maple. It was old, formidable, huge branches and cloaked in leaves.

“Here, come on, if we get up fast enough they might not see us.”

He cupped his hands together to give Sophia a boost. “It’ll be fine. You’ve climbed trees before right? Shane and I climbed lots of trees when we were your age.”

“I’m good at it,” Sophia said softly.

“I bet you are. You show me the best way up, I’ll follow your lead.”

Sophia scampered into the branches. She was better at it than Rick had been even at her age, just swung her leg onto an ascending branch and used it to pull herself up, relying on an innate athleticism that Rick had always found beyond him. They were high in the branches, sheltered by the foliage, the trembling green fans of leaves thick enough to hide them completely, by the time the walkers loped into sight.

There was a tense moment when Rick worried it wouldn’t be enough, that the walkers had their scents and couldn’t be fooled so easily. That they’d be trapped here, horde ringed around the base of the huge Sugar Maple as more and more responded to the cries of the first, until they starved to death or the group came to save them, blazing in with guns drawn like the cavalry of the old west. But that fear passed, and so did the walkers. They lumbered onward, loping off toward the sinking sun.

Rick put a finger to his lips to keep Sophia from talking. They weren’t quite out of danger. That was what had started this--letting their guard down too early. She hugged the huge trunk of the tree harder, pieces of bark flaking beneath her fingertips.

Once the sun disappeared behind the tips of the tree line, Rick nodded.

“We should be alright now. Do you need help getting down?”

Sophia dropped with the grace of a gymnast, using her legs again, she squinted at him as she watched him toe his way careful, testing the sturdiness of each branch before he made his actual descent. He was reminded impossibly of Shane again, Shane seven and wild haired and sunkissed, dangling upside-down by his knees from a branch, tongue out and teasing Rick for being slow.

“Do _you_?”

He chuckled. “Probably. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

They jogged back to the highway hand in hand. Paranoid. They flinched at any rustle in the bushes. Carol came vaulting over the guardrail when she saw them, arms open, and Sophia leapt into her embrace, sobbing “mama, mama” as her hair was kissed and pet. It made Rick proud after all the pain of the day, the losses they’d endured, to know he was responsible for bringing a mother back her little girl.

Carl hugged him breathless, squeezing tight enough his ribs hurt.

“I was worried you weren’t going to come back.” _Like Shane_ and that was a wound Rick thought may always be open, would never heal or scab over, not on its own. Time may not be enough to dull it. Years down the line they would probably still find themselves thinking of him.

“I’ll always come back to you and your mom, Carl.”

Carol hugged him next. Still crying. She held him and kissed him with her tear wet mouth. “Thank you, oh Rick, thank you.”

They regrouped. Too jumpy to be apart. Andrea and Daryl had gone out after Rick and Sophia as soon as the herd had fully passed. Rick was too tired to consider going out to find them. They’d come back or they wouldn’t and with nightfall approaching, he couldn’t do anything about it either way.

Daryl and Andrea returned to the highway together at sunset, flushed and panting. Rick worried they’d gotten into trouble or that the herd had looped around in its pursuit. They were crowded into the RV, too on edge to not sleep together. They were in for a long night hunkered down, the kids sleeping in Dale’s bed, the rest of them finding spots of their own sitting up or curled on the floor.

“There’s a house,” Andrea gasped, pressing her hand against a stitch in her side. “We saw it while we were out looking for you.”

“‘S a farm.” Daryl pointed his crossbow toward the horizon. “Coupla miles west. Might be more food there, well for water. Saw smoke coming from the chimney.”

“It’s worth investigating. Can we make it before nightfall?”

“Be better to go in the mornin’, don’t wanna risk runnin’ into trouble in the dark.”

It was the first good news they’d gotten. “We’ll set out at first light. Hopefully, whoever’s there, they’ll let us stay.”

***

Winter came early and with a vengeance. Their group was fortunate to have found the farm when they did. They got to enjoy the tail end of an Indian summer and fall harvest. It was worth the pain they’d endured to watch Carl and Sophia run through the autumn stalks of golden corn, laughing as they helped pick apples and tend to the young calves that had been born.

Snow started in December, not abnormal, but it wasn’t the little prickles of snow, delicate and thin as gossamer, spun sugar flurries that melted once they hit the ground. These were huge, wide flakes, the size of Rick’s thumbnail and bigger. They dusted the grass white and didn’t vanish, kept on accumulating, two full inches in as many days, more than they saw in an entire year.

It was unrelenting. After the first break in the snowstorm, they layered up and headed outdoors. The animals needed tending. The perimeter had to be inspected. Hershel had concerns.

“We’ll have to go out and get firewood,” Hershel said. “The pipes will freeze if we don’t keep the house heated. And the fuel for the generator won’t last if we run it all winter.”

Rick and Otis took first shift. They dressed in some neon orange fleeces Glenn had liberated from a clothing depot on a run into town and clomped off through the snow. Rick thought it made sense to cut wood past the tree line, deep into the forest, so as to not give their position away. Otis insisted on the bright colors, hunting season, better to be visible from a distance than get in a bullet’s way.

He’d never been in the woods before like this. Snow crunched underneath his boots. The icy air made each breath painful. The hushed quiet made him feel he was stepping into a picture, one of the landscapes his mother had kept in the parlor, a sleepy winter farmhouse glowing beneath a low winter moon.

“This one looks good,” Rick said, tipping his axe toward the base of a tall Sycamore. Big. Not too far from the house. It would do.

Otis shook his head. “We start with the dead trees first. They’ll be drier. You can’t just cut down a live tree, the wood has too much water, it’ll fill the house up with smoke.”

Otis guided him toward a toppled tree. Rick couldn’t tell the kind, though that had always been his forte when he went camping as a kid. He’d loved the little classification pocket guide his father had bought him, the one with names and pictures for every plant native to the Southeast. He’d loved that little book to pieces, literally. He’d cried when it had fallen apart so much it had to be thrown away.

The tree was half buried in snow, blackened, stripped bare of its leaves. It made Rick think of a walker, something cut down prematurely, unnaturally, not subject to the normal laws of death and decay.

They set to work.

Rick couldn’t help but remember chopping logs with Shane for the one summer they’d been cub scouts. He hadn’t been strong enough, each time he brought the axe down it barely sank into the wood. Shane’d had the opposite problem. On a backswing, the head of the hatchet broke off and flew behind his shoulder, almost nailing their scoutmaster in the face. They’d both been relegated to wood stacking duty after. Shane would have been the help they needed now. He and Otis had to keep taking breaks, panting, and it took multiple strikes before their axes could break through. Shane would have taken it in stride, smiling, whistling as he brought his axe down smooth.

They pulled the wood behind them toward the farm on a red toboggan. It must have belonged to Hershel’s daughters, brought out only for these rare winters. It looked hand carved, made with care and dedication. Rick could picture Hershel bent over cuts of wood in his workshop, lovingly crafting a Christmas gift for his girls.

They passed Beth on her way back from the chickencoop. She appeared startled. She was in a panic, running too fast to even clear the snow from her boots when she made it inside the house. They followed the trail. She threw her arms around Hershel and burst out sobbing, “oh Daddy! They’re all dead.”

Hershel stroked Beth’s hair. Rick felt as shocked as Hershel looked. The only ones out on sentry duty right now were Glenn and Daryl and, Rick realized with growing alarm, he hadn’t planned to check on them until they finished their shift at noon. If they were dead, their first line of defense was gone. “Who Beth?” Hershel asked gently.

“Mama,” Beth was crying so hard now she was choking, “Mama and Shawn and everyone else. They’re not moving.”

Rick rapped his knuckles on the door of the barn. Listened. There was no moaning. No scratching. No hands scrabbled on the walls of the barn for purchase, testing for weakness. The barn was still and silent as stone.

Rick nodded to Daryl and Glenn and they pulled the doors open.

The smell hit first, rotten meat, the lingering offal from daily feedings, the wet smell of decomposing hay. The death smell wasn’t as strong as he would have expected. The walkers Hershel had spent months collecting had mostly dried out by now, all fat and tissue gone from their bones and corded muscle. They were gray and wrinkled like the mummies from Carl’s ancient Egypt picture book. Shriveled down and frozen solid into grotesque positions—hands outstretched, teeth gnashing, tensed in rage, their expressions perpetually howling.

Daryl tapped the foot of the nearest walker with the butt of a crowbar. It made a pinging noise--metal over ice. It was that little noise that broke Hershel. Rick watched it come over him, his eyes and face falling, his hands twisting into curls.

Hershel sunk to his knees. “I didn’t think to give them a change of clothes,” he said to the dirty floor. He laid his bare hand on the blue cheek of his late wife. “I should have given them blankets. I thought….the barn’s insulated and even the cows and horses know to huddle together for warmth.”

Dale was there, a blessing, the reserve of serenity Rick didn’t know how to be, touching Hershel’s gently on the shoulder. “No one could have predicted this, you did everything you could. Now let us help.”

They spent the day preparing for the funeral. It took a long time. They could only go out in groups of three to find kindling for the pyres. They couldn’t risk any more manpower being too far from home. By the time they were finished the sun had set and a slivered moon had risen. The dim light cast the snow gray as metal.

Rick joined Lori and Carl. Lori tucked the end of the quilt she and Carl were wrapped in around him. She slid her hand in his when Hershel began his sermon. Rick let the words, the weight of their meaning, provide some comfort. They hadn’t had the chance to bury their own dead, not the ones they’d lost along the way. Shane. Jim. Jacqui. Their loved ones gone in the early days of the plague. Rick had woken up into a world cast into terror. Everything he’d ever known lost to him overnight. This was what they needed, a funeral to process, to let go, and look toward the future. There would be good things to come. A new baby. New love.

“I give you back,” Hershel said, his voice loud and clear over the soft weeping, “go unto God, his embrace is one of everlasting peace and glory. He returns you to dust from bone.”

In unison, they ignited the pyres. The orange flames blazed skyward. The heat they cast warmed the frigid faces of everyone who stood mourning in the snow.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is now set to be longer than my original plan. All the gross sex parts come later. This chapter contains canon character deaths.
> 
> Thank you so much to Book_Wyrm for encouraging me to continue with this and not throw it in the garbage where it belongs.

Rick mourned the rising of the sun. Daybreak brought the weight of the dread in his chest to a precipice, crushing him beneath the unspeakable heaviness of what had to be done. He’d wanted a few more hours to dream, to lie beside his breathing child and pretend nothing had changed—that they were somewhere death couldn’t touch them, where the breeze carried the scent of bread baking, honey and wildflowers, not burnt rubber and decaying skin.

Sunlight revealed a trail of flattened grasses and crushed leaves leading to the kids’ tent. The walker, legs splintered to bone and flapping muscle, had dragged itself, maybe for miles, spilling its insides, down the long road that led to here. It made Rick wonder whose god he’d offended, what sin he’d wrought, for his children to be taken from him this way, to be left in the world brutally alone. He’d lost so much already.

He worked in a daze. Everything was blurred, phantom smoke stinging his eyes, it made everything muted. He shuffled through his morning routine on autopilot--changing out of his blood stiffened clothing, assigning someone to walk the perimeter. He did it all without feeling. Without noticing. It didn’t feel like living. And it felt good to be so far outside of himself again.

Shane paced. He was in constant motion. Staying occupied was probably the only thing keeping him from losing control. As it was, Rick felt himself coming apart at the seams, a stitch that unraveled itself with aching slowness, but could never be properly sewed back into place. He helped Carl move out of the remnants of the tent he’d shared with his sister. The smell of dried blood was overwhelming. Carl limped slowly, favoring his good leg, bite mark wrapped. The blood seeping through the bandage gave its shape away.

Sophia burst into tears when Carl came to sit beside her. Someone had started cooking breakfast, a pot bubbled over the fire, the air held the scent of meat. It should have been cheerful. A beautiful morning, the gray skyline warming to pink and purple, full of promise, a hot summer day in bloom.

“Do you need anything, Carl?” Rick was at a loss for what to offer. Tea? A bible? What was there left in the world Carl could want more than a chance to keep on living?

Carl shook his head. “I’m alright, dad.”

Shane walked by, rubbing his face with both hands. Rick hadn’t been able to coax him into putting on more than his briefs. It was eerie to watch him flit about the camp. He shone golden and fit and healthy despite the melancholy that had leached the rest of them of color, it gave the appearance of an angel walking amongst them, respelendid, full of glory, come to mock their suffering on earth.

Finished with whatever chores he’d assigned himself, Shane made his way back to the ruins of the tent. Judith was still there, wrapped in a quilt someone had fetched for her, laid out on the ground like a bundle of cloth. The walker was there too, belly split open, half its head blown away. Its yellowed teeth bared skyward. 

“I got it.” T-Dog forced himself in-between Shane and the body. He hefted the corpse up by its shoulders, making his way over to the opposite corner of the camp where Glenn was digging out a fire pit. Daryl had already gone out to scavenge for more gasoline.

“Yeah, alright,” Shane said. He left and returned again with the shovel. “I’ll be back bud.” Shane smoothed Carl’s damp hair over, smiling fondly at the stubborn jut of Carl’s cowlick refusing to stay down. “Gonna take care of your sister for a bit, okay?”

“You don’t have to.” Carl was somber. He looked older than he was, older than any of them, like he’d lived a life too full of hardships and welcomed the chance to put the agonies behind him. “I want us to go in together so she won’t be scared. She shouldn’t have to be alone.”

Shane turned away from Carl abruptly. He ducked his head. Rick heard the clang of the shovel falling to the ground in the distance. Shane started walking, stiff, until his body warmed enough to run, off toward the tree line and down into the gully.

Carl grimaced himself into standing. He wobbled, gripped his leg like that would stop the lash of pain from radiating upwards. “I’ll go talk to him, Dad.” He slid the blanket off his shoulders and draped it over Sophia.

Rick pushed Carl back down. He tucked the ragged blanket around Carl and Sophia both, how he remembered Lori doing the same for him once as they stood out in the snow. Sophia lifted her arm and Carl shifted toward her, his cheek pillowed on her shoulder. His blue eyes were glacier melt--painfully cold.

“No Carl, you stay, rest up. I’ll go. He’s just in his own head right now, I’ll bring him back.”

He found Shane crouched at the bank of the river. He was breathing like he’d been born running and this was the first time he’d stopped. He had the heels of his hands pressed deep against his eye sockets. He wept, and the sound was horrible, it ground in Rick’s stomach like jagged ends of bone.

Rick didn’t know what to do. He’d never seen Shane cry, not in all the years he’d known him. Shane had been dry eyed at his own mother’s funeral. Unflappable. He was the one you wanted in a crisis, the guy who took a dozen hits and kept on coming. Shane reduced to tears was a reminder he was human. That, eventually, everything came to an end.

He watched Shane shake until his overwhelmed muscles gave out on him and he sank into the dirt. He kept his hands at his eyes awhile longer, waiting for his breathing to steady before he brought them down. If Rick hadn’t seen it for himself, he would never have thought Shane capable of crying.

Rick touched Shane on the shoulder. He squeezed it, he hoped, in reassurance. To let Shane know this was something they had to do together.

“Surprised you found me,” Shane said without humor. His voice sounded foreign. Flat. “You used to get lost just trying to remember where you parked.”

Rick cleared his throat. “He doesn’t need us making things harder for him right now, Shane. You can’t go running off like that. Making a scene.”

Shane’s expression turned ugly. Mean. He stood up and stepped back. He moved again when Rick tried to close the distance. “You think we should act like everything’s fine? It’s all cake and roses? He knows he’s dying, Rick. Nothing we do is gonna change that.”

“He doesn’t need theatrics. He needs to know he’s taken care of. He shouldn’t have to spend any time worrying about you right now. This is about him.”

“This ain’t his wedding day Rick. No one’s trying to steal his thunder—Jesus. He’s dying. What he needs is to know people care about him, that they’re hurting too.”

Rick could only think of Lori. He’d done his best to be strong for her. Carl needed that from Rick now, someone to bear his burden because he couldn't—shouldn’t, needed his father to protect him, to keep the bad things away. “I know what he needs. I’m his father.”

“That doesn’t mean you know what’s best for him. I’ve known that boy all his life. When you were gone, I was the one looking after him.” _And I did a better job than you_ , went unsaid. But Rick could see it burning in Shane’s eyes. Could taste it bitter in the air like poison.

“I looked out for Carl just fine before you came back to distract me. This never would have happened if you’d let things be. Let me be.”

Shane reared back like Rick punched him. Rick would have too, if he thought there were any use to fighting.

“ _I_ distract you?” Shane was as mad as Rick had ever seen him. He looked ready to fight. To draw his gun. “Whose idea was it to let them sleep on their own, huh? I told you it was dangerous. I _told_ you but nah man, you had to have it your way.” Shane did a cruel mockery of Rick’s own voice, “we’ll have the whole night to ourselves Shane. We don’t have to worry about waking the kids up. Carl needs some ‘independence’.” Shane spat, as though even pretending to see things from Rick’s perspective disgusted him. “Well look what it got you this time. Was a little alone time worth Carl and Judith’s lives?”

Rick hauled Shane in close by the throat. He felt Shane’s pulse beating against his palm, strong, erratic. Alive. A secret part of him wanted to say it should have been Shane back there, Shane lingering beside the fire, Shane sleeping on his own. Shane torn to pieces, shredded like the nylon side of the tent. “The only reason you’re not eating teeth right now is because I won’t do that to Carl. He deserves to go as peaceful as possible.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shane said, Rick felt his throat muscles clench and unclench against his palm. “Carl’s already paying for your mistake. Wouldn’t wanna do anything else to inconvenience you.”

Shane stalked off. Rick could hear him crunching like a bear through the bushes. He had to take his own moment now to stand beside the creek. He stared down at the surface of the blue-green water, watched the play of the sunlight there, winking, bright and joyful, until his eyes stung and he had to look away.

***

Carol methodically kept track of months on the calendar. She had a big one with cheery pictures of landscapes up on the wall in the living room where most of the group slept. Each morning she ticked off a box toward an unspoken date creeping ever closer.

March was a rainswept riverbank. Water like glass, disturbed by individual raindrops at the surface, behind it a forest, trees huge and green.

Rick was terrified of April.

It was a pretty morning. Lori had been up most of the night pacing, restless. The baby gave her heartburn and backaches. Insomnia. Every day she said she was ready for the swollen ankles and constant need to pee to end.

Rick dressed, opening the blinds to let in the sunshine in the bedroom. The farm was starting to come alive after its sleepy winter. The grayed grass was starting to grow in patches, bringing with it little bursts of color, and it had Hershel making noises about seeding the fields soon. Rick thought that would be nice, having Carl learn a skill he could keep with him, something useful and nonviolent, a legacy Hershel could leave him when he passed.

Lori was in the kitchen making eggs. Carl sat at the breakfast table, morosely doing the reading Lori assigned him, occasionally stuffing a bite of breakfast into his mouth. Hershel had different books on animal husbandry that Lori had set Carl to going through. He had to write up reports after. It had kept him busy through the worst parts of the cold season.

“Smells good,” Rick said, pecking Lori on the cheek. The eggs in the pan sizzled, the room heady with the smell of homemade butter, yolks gleaming with a thin layer of fat.

“Help yourself.” Lori handed him the spatula, “I’m gonna waddle off to the bathroom. Again.”

Beth, who Rick hadn’t noticed was in another corner of the kitchen kneading dough for that day’s bread, giggled.

Lori paused, she braced one of her hands against the doorway, the other came up to her belly. She closed her eyes and grit her teeth. 

“Lori?” Rick set the pan down on the counter. Beth yelled something about the countertops burning and she ran over to get it. Carl looked up from his homework, frightened, eyes on his mother as she groaned in pain.

She shook her head. Rick stood there, waiting, unsure what to do when Lori exhaled and said “the baby’s coming.”

“I’ll go get my dad,” Beth said, out the door in a second, still with flour and bits of dough stuck to her hands.

Carl came over to Lori, looking both excited and terrified. Rick felt the same, that shivery mix of dread and exhilaration he hadn’t experienced in thirteen years.

Lori tensed again, her hand blindly fumbling to find Carl and grip onto his shoulder. Rick took hold of her elbow, he and Carl useless to do more than watch. “This is gonna go fast,” she panted.

“Carl, you go out to the chicken coop and find Carol and Sophia. Stay with them while I help your mother.”

Carl frowned. Rick was afraid Carl would say no, refuse him. Say that he wanted to be there, to be a part of it, but Lori’s face went white again, and he nodded. 

Lori cupped his cheek with her hand. “We’ll call you in when you have a brother or sister.”

“Do you want to go to the bedroom?” He asked, trying to take more of her weight as they walked.

“Well I don’t want to have the baby in the kitchen,” Lori said, wheezing.

“Might be a bit unsanitary,” he mused, Lori smiling in agreement. They slowly made their way down the hallway. Rick was glad for the warm in the weather, it meant the house was empty, everyone tending to chores outside. No one had to see Lori like this or intrude on the intimacy of the moment. It was just him and Lori, same as before.

Rick was as panicked now as he had been when they were going to have Carl, but Lori was as calm as ever.

He helped Lori change into old t-shirt. She had to stop, shirt halfway over her head, to breathe through a contraction. “God, I’m nervous,” she said when it ended, “they say it’s supposed to be easier the second time.”

“Was it Sandra who told you that?” Rick tugged the shirt down around her belly. “She had what, seven kids? I bet by the fifth they just walk right out.”

Lori laughed, and the laughter turned into a grunt as she struggled for breath. She’d been right. Things now were faster. More intense. They’d spent a whole day at the hospital waiting for Carl, walking up and down the antiseptic scented hallways trying to get her to progress.

Lori settled into bed. Rick tried to remember the things they’d learned together years earlier from their lamaze classes. It felt like so long ago they’d been here, on the verge of welcoming a new life into the world. He felt too old to do it. Too weary.

“Do you need anything? Some water? A snack?”

“Rick Grimes, you try to feed me anything and I will throw it right up on you.”

Patricia came into the room smiling, holding a stack of fresh pillows and linens. She was humming. It was reassuring, her curls bouncing, falling around her face golden—she wasn’t nervous, she acted as if she’d done this a hundred times before. She was anxious for them to get on with it, engaged to be here in the process of helping birth their baby. It was good to have someone who wasn’t scared.

“Oh,” Lori sat up, wincing. Her voice took on a high, frantic note, “I think my water just broke.”

Patrica rubbed Lori’s arm soothingly, “alright, let’s get you up, change the sheets. Rick, help me strip the bed.”

He pulled down the comforter and froze. He watched Patricia put her hand to her mouth and run out of the room, yelling for Hershel. The sheets around Lori were soaked in blood and the stain kept growing, the insides of Lori’s thighs streaked red.

Hershel came in quickly. He ushered Rick out, keeping only Patricia with him. The doctors had done the same to Rick thirteen years ago, sending him out on an errand for ice chips, so they could examine Lori without his interruptions. It was worse now without Shane to talk to in the lobby. Shane who had nearly camped out in the plastic orange chairs with the godawful cigars he’d bought for them to smoke when the baby came.

In a few minutes Hershel exited the bedroom. His face had no expression, just like a doctor’s did when he had bad news to tell. Rick was immediately sick, nauseous, his stomach gripped by hard, awful cramps. “I’m going to have to do a c-section. I think it’s a placental abruption, you see it sometimes in horses. It means the placenta has split from the uterus. It causes bleeding and makes it hard for the baby to get oxygen.”

Rick nodded. He’d been there for Carl’s c-section, they’d taken Lori down to the OR after Carl’s heart rate started dropping. They’d had him out in less than three minutes. “She had one with Carl—we thought maybe she wouldn’t need to this time.”

Hershel frowned. He had a look Rick had seen often. Like Rick wasn’t hearing him, wasn’t understanding.

“Rick, I don’t have any anesthesia. I don’t have half of what I’ll need to do this safely. We don’t operate on mares, usually they expel the dead foal before their own life is in danger. I’ve already spoken with Lori, she wants to do it now, she doesn’t want to wait. The baby will die if we wait for her to try and deliver.”

Rick swallowed. He tasted blood somewhere, faintly. His heart beat loudly in his ears, giving everything an underwater quality. Dreamy and too fantastic to be real. “You have to give her something. You can’t just cut into her without it. Hershel, you _can’t._ ”

Hershel gripped him firm by his shoulders, “I’m doing what she asked me. We have to respect her decision, she knows the risks.”

Rick wanted to throw a tantrum like Carl had when he was little, the horrible fits he threw himself into to get his way. He wanted to be selfish, to be unfairly cruel. To plead with her to reconsider, to wait, just awhile.. They could always have another baby. Lori was the only wife he had. But she wanted this baby, badly enough she was willing to let them cut her open for it fully conscious. Hershel was right. They had to respect her wishes.

Hershel gestured at Otis. He’d materialized somewhere. So had the majority of the group, everyone crowded into the parlor. He saw Carl in the back, holding onto Sophia’s hand.

“T-Dog, Daryl, you come too. You’ll need to help Otis hold her down.”

Rick shook his head. He put his hand out to stop Otis as he tried to force his way by. “Let me. She’s my wife. I should be the one to do it.”

Otis folded Rick’s arm into his chest, and said, gently “you’re the last person who needs to see this. You don’t want that in your head. We’ll be good to her. I promise.”

The four of them disappeared back into the bedroom and Rick covered Carl’s ears when Lori started to scream. It seemed to go on forever, long past when she should have slipped into unconsciousness. It seemed more than a human being could bear.

At last Lori quieted and a mewling began, a lot like a kitten, and those kitten noises turned into squalling. That newborn wail vibrated in the warm air.

T-Dog rushed out. He was shaking. He made it to the wastebasket and retched, full body heaves that brought up long strings of saliva onto the wooden floor. His shirt was soaked through with sweat and blood droplets. Daryl said nothing but came up behind T-Dog and put a hand on his back as he continued heaving, face pinched. He refused to make eye contact. 

Otis came out with Hershel a while later, blood dried to the ends of their sleeves. The wet front of Hershel’s apron gleamed in the sunlight. “You can go in and see her.”

Lori lay there, listless, white as the bedsheets. Her eyes were closed. For a horrible moment Rick thought her dead, lifeless until her reanimation, but then he noticed her shallow breathing. The baby was bundled beside her, nestled into the crook of her arm. It squeaked and moved, one tiny hand waving up in the air angrily.

He tiptoed his way to the bed.

“Hey,” Lori whispered, opening her eyes. They were so deep in her face they seemed sunken, ringed around with circles that looked like bruises. A mostly empty bag of blood dripped steadily down through the IV into her arm, the second they’d managed to get from Carol before she felt too faint.

“Hey,” he said, doing his best to sound normal, not like a man who had listened to his wife’s screams as she was gutted and bled out onto Hershel’s marriage bed, “how are you feeling?”

She licked her dry lips, “been better.”

“I bet.” He picked up a cup from the nightstand and offered it to her, helped her close her mouth around the straw. As she drank he smiled, “a girl. You always wanted a girl, remember how convinced you were that Carl was going to be a Carla? Poor Shane had to repaint the whole nursery blue before we got back from the hospital.”

“Take her,” Lori said, strangely distant, not as content as Rick to let herself get lost in the memory. Rick didn’t blame her, she’d been through more agony than anyone deserved. “I’m tired. Go let Carl see her, let me get some sleep before he comes in here. I don’t want to scare him.”

Rick lifted the tiny weight that was his daughter. She made squeaky noises of displeasure, eyes scrunched, nostrils flared, spitting mad to be ripped from her former home. He brought her to his chest to soothe her.

Carl was off in the same corner he’d retreated to when Lori started screaming. Sophia crouched with him. Carl still had his fists over his ears.

“Carl, come see your sister.”

She went easier to Carl, more accustomed to being held. She blinked her big eyes open. She locked onto her brother, dark eyes like ink in the shadows, taking him in.

“Hi,” Carl said, shuddering, and the tears he had held back earlier came flooding. Rick wanted to join him in catharsis, relief and sorrow mixed together, grief at having to witness Lori’s suffering, exhalation at the baby’s safe delivery. Carl cried and cried, holding his little sister tightly, kept her tucked into him until the closeness put her to sleep, those big eyes finally closing.

Lori came down with a fever by sunrise. Her skin greyed as she lost her last bit of pallor, what blood she had turned to poison. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she seized, body convulsing back and forth across the bed.

This time Rick had to help keep her pinned. Patricia and Maggie brought in buckets of ice they’d plugged the freezer in to start making when Lori first went into labor and packed it around Lori. Under her armpits, her neck, her knees, thighs, groin. The red slit of her Cesarean scar across her belly grinned at Rick in a perverse parody of his wife’s smiling mouth. The ice made Lori shiver, teeth rattling hard together, but it brought the fever down. When all she could do was tremble, muttering to herself incoherently, they were allowed to let her go.

Hershel wiped a splotch of blood from his face. His hands were covered. He moved down Lori’s body to the wet site of her incision. He prodded Lori somewhere deep inside. She made a horrible sound, like it was torture, and there was nothing else it could be. It didn’t seem right for anyone to be allowed to suffer so completely. “Rick,” Hershel said, haggard. “Her stitches opened during the seizure. I don’t have enough suture left to close her up again. I can make do without it, but my real concern is the infection. I don’t think I got all the placenta out during the C-section and, frankly, I don’t know what else to do. I’ll have to cut her open again to remove it.”

Otis crushed his hat between his hands. He’d continued to linger in the doorway. “I can go to the high school. They’ll have antibiotics at the FEMA center. If I can get a few people to go with me—”

“No,” croaked Lori, coherent, “no more, please. I can’t take it.”

Rick knelt at her side and took her hand between his. He kissed it. “It’ll just be a little more Lori. This time we’ll get the medicine, anesthesia, you won’t have to feel a thing.”

Lori’s sweat soaked hair stuck to her temples when she moved her head. “I said _no_. I got her out Rick, she’s here, she’s healthy. I’m okay with whatever happens next.”

Tears like molten lead pressed at his eyelids. He couldn’t keep them in. “Y0u can’t give up Lori. We’ve come so far, please, after everything—everyone we lost—you’re safe now.”

She slipped back into unconsciousness. Her hand went slack in his and he laid it back down on top of the covers. The underwater feeling from earlier had returned, he felt he was floating, too far off to make a difference, stuck watching everything happening far below.

Hershel dipped his head in prayer. In absolution. Or maybe it was shame, guilt at failing, for not coming through in the end. “I’ll give her what I can to keep her comfortable.”

Rick felt himself free falling. The life he’d known, his family, they were gone from him, or about to be. He felt himself drop down and down. There was no bottom to where he was going, just dark and cold.

He and Carl sat vigil with Lori through the night as her fever climbed higher. Her breath began to rattle. The foul odor of death crept through the room.

Midmorning, the open window painted Lori in a swatch of sunshine. Her sweat dried in the spring breeze. Rick’s stomach turned to poison, something bad was coming. Carl sensed it too. He crawled onto the bed beside his mother and pressed himself as close as he could get to her, resting his head on her chest.

“The baby,” Lori rasped, hyperalert, her hands flailing against the mattress. “My baby.”

“She’s here, Lori. She’s here.” Rick brought the baby up to the curve of Lori’s shoulder. Laid her there, facing Lori, the two of them nose to nose.

Lori kissed her daughter’s eyelashes. Her apple cheeks. Her screaming mouth. “Oh baby girl,” Lori sing-songed, “tiny girl.”

“Mom,” Carl choked, breathing funny. Trying to hold back his tears. Rick couldn’t see his face and he was glad for it. He didn’t want to see the pain there. He didn’t want that etched into his memory forever—the raw look of a boy about to lose his mother. He’d seen it in his job enough before.

“Don't you be sad Carl.” Lori brought her hand over and settled it on the nape of Carl’s neck. “You’re gonna have so much happiness ahead of you. Oh sweet boy you’re going to live, don’t let anyone tell you different. You’re the best of us, the best thing I ever did.”

It was hard to swallow. Rick’s ribs were seconds from collapsing in on themselves--like guitar strings pulled too tightly, one pluck from ruin. It took everything in him to hold up his head.

“Talk to me Rick.” Lori closed her eyes. She breathed fast and uneven. “Tell me something nice.”

Rick kissed her hot hand and held it to his mouth so she could feel his lips move against her skin. “Do you remember…” Rick felt his throat close. He had to stop. To try again. Carl gasped wetly on Lori’s left, face buried in her shoulder. Her fingers stroked back and forth through his hair. “When I first met you, I said to Shane, ‘that’s the girl I’m going to marry’,” Rick broke down, had to press Lori’s hand to his mouth to hold the sobs in. He had so much more to tell her. _I fell in love with your laughter. The shine in your eyes like starlight._

Lori took a slow, deep breath, smiling, finally, like it was easy, this one little thing. She didn’t let it out again.

“Lori?” He whispered, knowing it was already over. There was no one. Nothing. His wife’s soul had departed, free from hurting, untethered at last.

He thought back to that talk with Shane long ago. Cramped in the squad car, lunch cooling between them. Lori had been right then, he saw that now. Even here, begging him to speak, to fill her last moments on earth with something more meaningful than silence, he had let her down yet again.

***

He and Lori had their wedding at sunset. Out in the chapel by the lake, the same pastor who had married Lori’s parents officiating, the water still as ice behind them, clear. It held every color of the sky inside it, pink roses and lilacs, orange like the marigold Lori tucked behind her ear.

The sun was setting now. It had sunk low enough the distant trees could hide it. Lightning split the sky, white and hot, prickling static of ozone. Rain on a wedding day. Good luck—it had sprinkled just before the ceremony, and seeing Lori for the first time, dewdrops spinning in her boquet’s petals, refracted light of the candles burning inside them, stole the breath from his body, sucked that wet grass and earth smell from his lungs.

Rick stumbled. He hit the ground and tasted blood. Iron. Bitter, red wine aged in an oak barrel. They’d only had white at their wedding. In case of spills. He got up and made it through the doorway just as the downpour started. The water washed away the smell of dying--it was cleansing, it reminded him of the story of Noah, humanity’s slate wiped clean in a furious bout of rain. Rick welcomed the flood.

He was in a bar. The hall they’d had their reception in. They’d allowed liquor, though both his and Lori’s mothers had protested. Rick had had one drink, a whiskey and coke Shane brought him. He’d sipped it over the course of an hour and let Shane finish the dregs.

He looked for Lori. She wasn’t waiting at the bar for another white wine and soda. He knew she must be dancing. The dance floor was empty except for Lori, littered with broken glasses, sea-jewel shards from bottles of beer. He watched her twirl, swaying to a private song, spinning a rhythm he could never hope to mimic. She smiled and ran from him—she’d run on their wedding night too, away from his hands and into the bathroom, playful as she changed out of her wedding dress and hung it up before it could wrinkle. She promised the anticipation would be worth it. He’d wait again, a minute, a year, an hour, it would be worth it, it had been worth it, every second with her he held dear.

Movement. A rustle, a clank. She was on her way back to him now. He opened his arms for her. Now was his chance, he would never let her go again, he was going to take her into himself, til death do they part, his forever.

 _Oh it’s you_ , Rick thought. And it was Shane there, smiling. He crunched his way across the floor. It was just like at his wedding—they’d danced together, Shane had asked, loud enough for everyone to hear, “pretty sure the best man’s supposed to dance with the bride” and stuck out his arm for Rick to hold onto. They’d stumbled around drunk, to roaring laughter, just for a second, Shane trying to show him some move Rick’s feet had never been able to manage. Shane then did actually dance with Lori and Rick had been struck by a potent wash of feeling watching them together, the two people he cared about most, his past and his present.

“Holy shit,” Shane said as he hugged him. “I didn’t think I was ever gonna see you again. What’re you doing out here? You alone? Where’s Carl? Lori?” Shane hugged him one more time, laughing, his palms on Rick’s cheeks, holding him, checking to see if he was real.

“She was just here a minute ago.” Lori and her white dress. Mouth wet with the taste of champagne and strawberries. A little smudge of vanilla frosting up by her ear. 

“Shit.” Shane swiveled his head, looking around, frantic. “Alright. We’ll find her and then get outta dodge. You fuckin’ spooked me, Jesus. You always manage to surprise me.”

A head popped around the corner. A kid, young enough he probably still lived with his parents. Had a part-time job after school at the Burger King. He waved, dirt smudged on his neck and above his eyebrows. Grungy like it was a fashion choice. He sidled up close to Shane.

“This guy bothering you Shane?”

Shane shoved the kid back. “Stop standing so close to me, man. We get into trouble and neither of us is gonna make it far if I’m tripping over your feet.”

“Sorry.” He smiled and extended a greasy hand. “I’m Randall.”

Rick stared at the hand offered to him. It was wrong for Randall to offer congratulations without the bride in the receiving line. What was it they said about showing up uninvited on a wedding day?

“Rick,” he said. His dry throat made the words sound like gravel. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here, it seemed impossible he’d run, but his mouth ached for water. He listened to the drumbeat of the rain.

Randall went down behind the bar. He rattled through a cupboard and reappeared with a bottle. He took a huge swallow, holding the bourbon by the neck. “Want some?”

Shane shook his head. “Get drunk on your own time. Go see if there’s anything better in the storeroom, yeah?”

Rick needed to sit. His legs were failing him. What he needed was rest now, a reserve, so he would be ready when Lori found him. He would take her wherever she wanted to go.

Shane hauled him back upright before he could actually sit down on a stool. “We’re going man, _now_. Before anyone has a chance to follow.”

No one had crashed their wedding. Shane hadn’t even brought a date. He’d spent the night flirting with all three of Lori’s cousins. No one else was coming.

Shane smacked him, gently, on the cheek. “Focus up. Which way did Lori go, Rick, is Carl with her?”

“No, no. Carl’s not...he wasn’t at the wedding.” The bones of Carl had been, they’d found out about him just four days after. Lori sick every morning of their honeymoon. 

“Wedding? What are you going on about?” Shane held his face between his hands. They were close, noses almost touching. He could take in Shane’s breath. “You get hit in the head or something? I need you to start making sense.”

Rick didn’t want to talk. Not to Shane. Not about Lori. He wanted the sweet aftertaste of coke. To dance with his new bride and see her again, whole, to feel the warmth of her love upon him like the last tendrils of fading sun.

When he didn’t answer, Shane sighed. “Fine, tell me on the way. My car’s parked a street over.”

“Hey, where’re you going?” Randall was back. He dropped the box of wine he was carrying so that he could pull his gun.

Shane put his hands where Randall could see them. “Nothing, Randall, put that away before you shoot somebody on accident again. I’m just helping Rick get back to his people. He’s hurt, I think he’s got a concussion, he’s out of it.”

Randall hurried forward. “I’ll come with you. You’ll need another guy if he’s all loopy. You’ll never make it back on your own.”

That was the last thing Rick wanted. Shane might not ask right now about Carl, about Lori, but Randall would. He’d want all the answers Rick didn’t know how to give. He didn’t want Randall there to ruin it. With just Shane, things could almost be normal. It could be before Lori, his whole life still to come.

“I’m pretty sure they’re close, no sense in both of us going. He can’t have gone far like this.”

Randall’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to sense he was being dismissed. He had the look of a boy who was used to being brushed aside, not included, left on the sidelines while everyone else went to play football. “If you don’t take me, I’ll tell Ken you ran off with him and all those supplies we got together.”

Shane cuffed Randall’s ear. “This ain’t kindergarten. You really think I care if you tattle? Go ahead and tell on me, you still aren’t gonna get your way.”

Randall rubbed his ear, wincing. “I’ll start yelling then. See how far you get with him before Trent and Matt come running.”

Shane looked like he was gonna slug Randall, hard this time. He tugged at his hair in frustration. “You little shit, fine. C’mere.” Shane pulled Randall in close, an arm across his shoulder. Randall beamed in the spotlight of Shane’s attention. He looked ready to take notes. “This ain’t a trip to Disneyland, you got that? I don’t know where his people are, it might take days. You can’t be screwing around. If I’m taking you out there with me I expect you to pull your weight. I gotta be able to count on you. I will leave you if you slow me down and I won’t look back, you hear me?”

Randall nodded, almost frantically. “I got it. I promise Shane, I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Good.” Shane slapped Randall’s back roughly, in a way that might have been interpreted as affection, if Rick hadn’t noticed Shane minutely shoving Randall toward the back door.

“You cover us. Keep an eye out for walkers following us. I’ll keep our path to the car clear.” 

Randall spun around, gun trained on the hallway. The set of his jaw was determined--a kid playing soldier. Carl made the same face when he played his shooter games.

Quicker than Shane should have been capable of moving, he got behind Randall, and grabbed his head. Randall made a noise, the start of a scream, maybe, but whatever sound it was died in his throat, lost in the sickening crunch when Shane twisted hard and broke Randall’s neck.

Randall crumpled to the floor. Eyes open. Shane snatched his gun, checked to make sure it was loaded, and stuffed it into his belt.

The world around Rick turned harsh. Grainy. It was like watching a worn out video--he’d come to the bad part of the tape and the picture ended abruptly. He was in a bar somewhere, Shane beside him, a dead boy at his feet.

“Shane you _can’t_ ,” he heard himself saying. Felt himself bend at the waist and vomit. He brought up all that he hadn’t eaten, the remnants of a two day old breakfast. One his wife was never going to burn for him again.

“I already did. Get a move on.”

Shane ushered him forward. Out into the rain. Rick felt the cold soak into him, through his clothes, through his skin, into his blood, chilled to the deepest part inside him. Cold and numb enough not to think.

***

Rick opened his eyes to moonlight silvered on low lying clouds. He smelled sweet grass and damp hay. A swatch of light painted the darkness yellow. Hershel was there, checking Rick over for injuries, for fever. Shane scooped him up and carried him over the threshold of the door.

“Gonna get these wet clothes off you, okay?” Patricia was talking but she sounded far away. She rubbed him briskly down with a towel before Shane got a new shirt on him. He was swaddled in a blanket and laid out on the couch. He’d lost time somewhere in the middle. 

“I don’t know,” Shane said. Hershel had a worried look on his face and he’d cleaned the blood off his hands. He wondered if they’d had time to strip the bed or if they’d burnt the mattress. “I found him wandering around. I could barely get him to say two words to me.”

Looking around, Rick saw that half of them were missing. Daryl, T-Dog, and Otis. Out looking for him, probably. Digging Lori’s grave--they couldn’t have laid her to rest already, not without Rick there to say goodbye.

“Is dad back?” Carl came down the stairs in his pajamas. He looked so tiny, sallow enough Rick could make out every freckle from across the room. His eyes were bloodshot from crying. It occurred to Rick that he hadn’t thought about how Carl was taking all this.

Carl’s face changed. He flooded with color. He yelled Shane’s name and charged.

It wasn’t a hug so much as a running tackle. Carl threw himself at Shane, near sobbing, asking Shane over and over what happened, pausing only to hug him again. He buried his face in Shane’s shoulder, hiding his tears there. Shane seemed as equally emotional, one of his hands cupping the back of Carl’s head, not stepping back when Carl made another move to hug him, letting Carl glue himself to Shane’s side. Shane’s eyes were wet and they sparkled in the soft orange glow from the fireplace.

“Wow,” Glenn shook his head hard like he was trying to reset himself. To free his eyes of the trick his brain was playing. Unwilling to believe Shane was really there. “It doesn’t even seem real. Of all the people Rick could have found, what are the chances it would be you?”

“Tell me about it.” Shane kept his hand on Carl’s head, petting the hair there, moving it down the back of Carl’s neck and pressing between his shoulders. Keeping Carl next to him. Checking, probably, to make sure Carl wasn’t a figment of his imagination, some phantom who had followed Shane along his journey. “Of all the gin joints in all the world…” Shane trailed off. He asked something, too quiet for Rick to hear. Glenn shook his head and Shane got up, excused himself to go to the bathroom, and Carl bounded along after him like a rabbit to show him the way.

Rick closed his eyes. He hoped that next time he opened them things would change. That this was a nightmare he just had to be scared out of. He would wake up, not like he had in the hospital, in his own bed, in his home, and everything would be okay.


End file.
